Stop Doing This One Thing to Rebuild Confidence and Self-worth

Today I'm going to teach you about something that has the power and capacity to completely alter your relationship to yourself, to your confidence, to your sense of self worth and self esteem. I'm going to start by just telling you one simple truth that probably flies in the face of what you experienced as a kid and maybe as an adult. You were never too sensitive. You were never too sensitive and you were never too reactive. You were trained, you were trained to override your instincts. You were trained to suppress your emotion and your sadness and you were trained to doubt your own intuition. Now why? Because somewhere along the way, you learned through parents, through conditioning, through your family system, through friends, teachers, that belonging was more important than your own inner sense of power or truth and authenticity. And so you made a trade. You traded your own power, your own truth, your own authenticity for approval, for safety, for connection and for validation. And today I'm going to show you exactly how that happened and give you one thing that you need to stop doing immediately if you want to claim your power back. So let's start by talking about how this training happens. Because the majority of men that I've worked with and spoken to over the last decade, they really share one core wound. There's one core wound that they have in common. They were told, directly or indirectly that their emotional responses were wrong or incorrect or needed to be altered, cut out. They heard things like, don't be so dramatic. Why are you always so angry? Why are you so sad all the time? Stop your crying. You're too much. You're never going to amount to anything. You're overreacting. So what does a child do when they hear those things? Well, a child doesn't think my mom or dad is, you know, they're being hyper reactive. They don't know how to deal with their emotions. My environment's unsafe. A child thinks something must be wrong with me. Something's fundamentally broken inside of me. And what do you learn? Well, in response to that, you learn to scan the room. You learned to read micro expressions in other people to to see am I safe? Am I loved? Do I belong? And you learn to anticipate disapproval from other people before it even happens. In another way of saying it, you became hyper attuned, not because you were broken. Your sensitivity was actually a form of intelligence that got squashed along the way. Your reactivity was your nervous system turn trying to protect you from something happening in your environment. But somewhere in that adaptation, you learned this one single rule that started to crush your sense of self, your sense of Confidence and your sense of self worth. If I suppress myself, how I'm feeling, what I'm thinking, what's truly going on inside of me, I'll be accepted. And that's the exchange. And it's likely that that exchange happened over and over and over and over again. As a child and as you grew up, you began to believe that this exchange was the foundation of relationship. I need to suppress myself, how I feel, what I think, my needs, wants, desires, what's going on inside of my intuition, my instinct is in order to be acceptance, in order to be accepted. So the cost of this exchange is fairly clear, right? Fast forward to now. Fast forward to your adulthood. You're in a relationship where likely you have to chronically explain yourself. You apologize for things that you know, when you're not even wrong, when you weren't even to blame. You second guess your instinct, your intuition, you second guess your gut, and you tolerate things all the time that you shouldn't. Now, you call this easygoing, but it's not ease, it's self abandonment dressed up as maturity. And here's the brutal truth, because I've experienced this firsthand every single time that you override your instinct, that your authentic knowing internally, just to keep the peace, you teach your nervous system and your brain that your truth is actually dangerous. And every time that you silence your anger to avoid conflict, you reinforce the belief that your power and your own potency threatens belonging. And over time, this creates resentment in your intimate relationships with your family, with your friends, with your coworkers or colleagues. Not because you're react, not because there's something emotionally wrong with you, but because you are chronically in a state of betraying yourself just to fit in. So you were never too much. You were just taught that your power, your emotions, how you felt, your response to things was an inconvenience to other people. Now this is where we need to talk about the one thing that you need to stop doing to correct this whole pattern. So I'm going to try and make this as clear and simple as possible, okay? First and foremost, stop apologizing for your emotional response before you understand it. Okay, let me say it again. Stop apologizing for your emotional response before you understand it, before you understand what's happening. Stop apologizing for the reaction, for the anger that might have come up, for the grief or the sadness or the disappointment or the frustration, before you've actually gotten curious about why you feel that way in the first place. Because the truth about those emotions is that they are Just data and information about your life and there is some validity and truth to them. Anger, for example, is a necessary response that when a boundary has been crossed, when somebody's trying to take advantage of you or accuse you of something that you didn't do or is pressing through and disrespecting you, anger is actually an appropriate response and informs you that your boundaries, your values relationally are being pushed through. So most men feel something, right? They feel hurt, they feel angry, they feel frustration, they feel sadness. And they immediately jump to sorry, I didn't mean that, or my bad, you know what, I had no right to say that, or I'm just being too sensitive or they don't even say anything in the first place. They just collapse and shut down instead. Pause. Instead of apologizing and shutting down, ask yourself what boundary just got crossed? What values of mine feel violated, what part of me is misunderstood and, and what is true inside of me that I actually need to express? Again, your emotions are just another type of data and information. They are not defects. They're not things that you need to kill off or suppress or deny or avoid. Now that doesn't mean that you need to weaponize your reaction. It doesn't mean that you can validate overreacting and yelling at people and calling them names and acting irresponsibly. It doesn't mean that you explode. To the contrary, it means that you honor what's actually happening inside of you before you edit it, before you sift through what's happening and communicate either a boundary, a value, a way that you would like to relate a need or a desire. And this is how you stop giving your power away. You stop giving your power away by denying how you actually feel. And you allow yourself to tune in to the experience that you're having and let it inform something that you need to communicate in your life. You let it inform a boundary. You let it inform a need, you let it inform a want or a desire. And the truth is that belonging requires that we let go of self betrayal and, and self abandonment. You cannot betray yourself. How you feel, what you want, what you need, what your boundaries are, and be in a healthy relationship. That is survival. Real connection comes when you can say, this is how I feel. This is what I need. This is actually what I desire. This was not okay with me. I did not like that. That wasn't all right. The way you spoke to me, what you just did, that's actually not okay with me. And I'm not going to apologize for just existing so you were never too sensitive. You were trained to abandon yourself. And the good news is that you can retrain yourself. And when you do this, you begin to exude confidence. You begin to feel a much deeper connection to mattering because you start to communicate and interact with with your internal experience, with your emotions, with your energy, with your intuition, with your gut, with your instinct from a place of honoring them. And it starts by not apologizing for the truth before you've listened to what it is inside of you. So if this hits, don't forget to man it forward. Don't forget to share it with somebody. Comment below. What you have been ignoring. How were you trained to ignore what was happening inside of you? So many men that I have seen and worked with have different variations of this. For me it was being told, you know, you're stupid, you're too soft, you're too emotional. Why are you acting like this? Don't get so angry, right? Calm down. Getting yelled at like that. And it started to squash my inner experience of how I actually felt. And I didn't have boundaries, I wasn't able to communicate my needs or all because I was trained to avoid the truth of my own experience. So what was that like for you? And what thing do you know in your life you need to honor and communicate? Pop it in the comments below. Man it forward. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you are. Tuning in until next week, Connor Viton signing off.